by Sarah Moon
You are eleven years old, a new seventh grader.
Except for occasional unplanned, unhappy glimpses — at the shopping plaza, say, passing a store window — you attempt to confine yourself to looking only in this medicine cabinet mirror, in which you exist as only a face. In this mirror, you can’t see your body, heavy and soft and hairless — almost like a girl’s, you think. You’ve read about Christine Jorgensen, the man who went to Denmark to have an operation that turned him into a woman, and seen her Before and After photos in Life magazine.
Maybe you’re like her, you worry. How else to explain what feels so unspeakable about you? And I wish you felt this as a question, rather than a worry. There is no right answer, no “explanation” necessary for any of the feelings you have right now that seem so unspeakable.
Your mother taps on the bathroom door. “Are you all right in there?”
In the months since your father’s death, she has begun to watch you more closely. She has taken to telling you that your father had confided in her before he died that he was worried that you played too much with girls. She says you need what she calls “male influence.”
But you keep studying your hair, pushing at it with your plastic comb. If I can just get my hair right, you keep thinking, I’ll be all right too. There’s not too much to praise about you. But people have told you that you have nice hair.
As for me, your older self: I’m standing behind you, though you can’t see me. But even if you could, you’d never turn to say hello. You wouldn’t want to hear a single word that I might have to say.
And why would you? I’m the homosexual our mother has warned you about.
If you were looking for me you’d be looking for a man in a white Cadillac, the one who supposedly offers rides to boys like you; or the man some kid once saw lurking by the creek down the hill from the schoolyard. And of course that man is a myth. But how else would you recognize me except through the stories you’ve already learned about men like me, the kind of man you hope never to become? I may as well be one of those inverts you once saw pictured in an old psychology book, five or six of them lined up against the bare concrete wall of a mental institution, their eyes masked with thick black lines, as if to grant them some modesty that they didn’t really deserve. You already understood, however, that those black lines covering their eyes were actually meant to protect the viewer from the awful sickness of their gazes.
There is much I’d like to tell you, if you were able to listen. I’d like to tell you that you’ll find love. That you’ll find true family among your dear, astonishing friends. That the world is larger and far different than anything you can yet imagine.
But you’re not ready to hear any of this.
You’re worried about your hair. You’re worried about school, where you wander the long corridors alone.
Even now, standing so close, it seems there is nothing I can do but wait for you to come forward, a heavy, unhappy child, and begin your long walk through the years ahead toward me. There’s nothing I can do but stand here, bearing toward you an affection that you cannot yet even begin to imagine offering yourself.
To my dear young Marion,
How glad I am to reach back to that long-ago girl to acknowledge your existence, perhaps even to offer a bit of advice. But which young Marion should I speak to?
The eleven-year-old who, in 1950, changed to a new school to escape the snide girls who made her life a daily misery … only to find that misery compounded. “If you are the problem,” you said to yourself, filled with a new sad wisdom, “moving doesn’t help, because you take yourself with you.” But still, you had no idea why you were the problem.
The thirteen-year-old who used to check her clothes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to make sure she wasn’t wearing yellow or green, the certain mark of a fairy? Did you know what a fairy was? You must have. Mostly, though, you knew that being a fairy was bad … bad beyond imagining.
The sixteen-year-old who waited to be invited back to her summer job at St. Mary’s Episcopal Girls’ Camp … and waited and waited? Your roommate waited too. The invitation never came. You were, you knew, the two best counselors the sisters had at that camp, but you were also something else that neither of you dared name. As innocent as your relationship was — and it was as innocent as two rule-abiding adolescent girls in love with each other could possibly be in 1955 — you were filled with shame at your silent dismissal.
The twenty-year-old who walked down the aisle of her childhood church to do what she knew she was supposed to do, marry a man? What did it matter that you knew you didn’t want him? “Till death do us part!” You made that vow with particular vehemence because you already understood you were going to have to hold yourself to it with every ounce of energy you could muster. And muster you did … for twenty-eight long years.
What advice do I have for that girl caught in a time when her deepest impulse toward love wasn’t acceptable to her family, to her friends, to her church, to her society, to the psychologists who handed down dictums about what was healthy and what — in their all-powerful certainty — was not? I find myself stymied. What can I say? The culture in which I grew up seems to obliterate all attempts at passing down wisdom into that time. Perhaps, though, a peek into the future, your future, will serve better than any advice.
The friendless eleven-year-old will grow past being eleven and being miserable and being awkward. And yes, she will have friends, many friends. Some will share her “difference,” many will not, but all will accept her exactly as she is. She will learn social skills she didn’t have at eleven. Especially, she will learn to listen and to care about the stories that make up other people’s lives. And that listening, that caring will bring her friends.
The older she grows, the wider her community will be too, and the easier it will be to find people she likes and who like her. She will move to a city where she will find a thriving lesbian community. She will join a church that supports lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people unequivocally. She will find a love that comforts and nurtures every single day. And she will come to understand that she doesn’t need affection or even approval from every person she meets.
The thirteen-year-old struggling over her wardrobe will learn to be who she is, wear what she feels good in, and let other people’s problems be theirs.
We all have to abide by certain rules about our dress unless we want to stir up a lot of fuss. But these days I decide for myself what I want my clothes to say. Most of the time my partner and I wear what is, I suppose, the uniform for aging dykes, jeans and T-shirts. That is our choice, not because it’s the uniform but because jeans and T-shirts are practical, comfortable, and economical. But still I love putting on a long skirt and a silky blouse and going into the world as that other part of this woman I am. And I love knowing that such choices are mine, no one else’s.
The sixteen-year-old who lost a job for a love she had not even dared name will find many doors in her life.
I was forty-seven years old before I had the courage and the insight to acknowledge my sexuality — even to myself — and to make the choices appropriate to what I finally understood. A few years later I edited and contributed to a collection of gay and lesbian short stories called Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence. As I was finishing the manuscript, an editor I had worked with for many years asked, “You aren’t coming out in that book, are you?” When I said I was, he was deeply concerned for my career. Another editor asked the same question and, getting the same answer, hesitated for a moment, then said, “Well … for every door that will be closed I’m sure another will be opened.” And that is the way it has been. Some doors may have closed, but others have opened and opened and opened. I have learned that being honest with myself and others, even and especially when that honesty comes hard, is its own reward.
The twenty-year-old marrying without a trace of desire will learn that she, inevitably, makes mistakes and that even mistakes can bring great gifts. My marriage
gave me two children and now a passel of grandchildren, and I wanted those children and those grandchildren with all my soul. Lesbians can adopt these days or even conceive, but in the 1960s, without my poorly chosen marriage, children would have been denied completely. That marriage also gave me a secure foundation from which I could develop my career during the long years before I could actually support myself with my writing. Would I have chosen a different life if I had known myself better? Of course. Do I regret the choices I made? There is no point. I just keep making choices, sometimes making mistakes, and living, day by day.
So what do I have to offer as advice for the girl I was and for those who will come after me? Only this: You will find love and you will struggle with that love as all humans do, but in that struggle will come a discovery that, at your very core, you are precisely who you are meant to be. In that understanding lies the beginnings of an honorable and healthy and enormously satisfying life.
Your capacity to love is your greatest strength and the greatest gift you have to bring to the world.
Live it. Rejoice in it.
Live and rejoice in yourself!
In gratitude for resilience and for the more open world I have grown into at age seventy-two,
Marion
Dear Lucy,
Right now you are thirteen years old, almost fourteen. Your body is changing: You have breasts, hips, and you don’t recognize yourself. You can’t run like you used to; your breasts get in the way, and your thighs, which have always been compact and muscular, have weight on them. It feels like your body is dragging you down.
You feel empty all the time. And you want things, big scary things. You can’t even say what they are because you don’t know the words for it, or how to give it a name. And you’ve started to have dreams about girls — dreams about kissing them, dreams about touching them. You wake up frightened. You wake up turned on. You wake up disgusted with yourself.
You go to school. You feel weird in your body — too big, hulking. You’re different from everyone and you know it. They know it too. They smell it on you. It’s more than the fact that you read too much and talk too much in class. It’s more than the fact that you’re poor, that your clothes, your hair, your shoes don’t match the rest of the kids. It’s something more. You feel like you’re wrong somehow.
You walk down the school halls and you see the girls you dream about. It feels strange to see them in real life because the dreams are so real. And in your dreams, their mouths, their hands, their words have been so intimate. You feel like you know them and they know you, but they don’t. And maybe nobody knows you, because sometimes you think there is something evil in you, something rotten because of the things you want, the things you are too terrified to name.
And, Lucy, you are lonely. You are so lonely you can hardly breathe. You want to be touched, kissed, held — you want to be loved and it seems impossible. Impossible that you will ever find the words to speak all the things inside you, speak all your longing, all your fear. You think you will drown in your longing. You’re terrified you’re just going to disappear.
But here is what is really going to happen: You will wait. It will be almost like fasting, the waiting, because you will be starving for love, starving to be seen. But you will find things to sustain you. You will read. You will write. You will listen to music. You will go to the movies. You will find a friend or a teacher or a coach who sees you and is brave like you. You will discover theater and the beautiful freedom of make-believe. You will invest in your imagination, in the power of telling and listening to stories. You will start to see that your story fits into the larger human story. You will know that your voice is important, and that you have something to say. And then, when you’re old enough, you will leave.
You will go to a big city and it will be bright, dirty, and you will be free. You will find your people and they will love you. They will see you, and when they do, all the things inside you, the things you think are ugly, dark, and rotten — they will call them beautiful, glorious, and wonderful. You will finally be kissed, held, and loved. It will be very romantic. And the want in you, the unnamable desire — one day you will just say it, name it, know it. You will say, “Oh, it’s so simple, I’m gay,” and you will be so, so happy about it. You won’t be alone. I promise you. I know, because I am you.
Love,
Lucy
Dear Garrett,
Don’t be blue. Despite how you feel sometimes, you really don’t have a lot to be blue about. True, you’re a poor country boy from the swamps of North Carolina. But, as improbable as it may seem, where you come from will become one of your greatest assets as a human being.
Look at everything. Remember everything. Observe everything from what it’s like to be in a tobacco field in the July heat, to the old women at First Baptist in their Sunday-go-to-Meeting hats and the rhythm of the Deacons’ prayers. Remember that feeling like lightning shooting through your arteries when you walk up on a rattlesnake. Remember the argument you had with Mrs. Johnson about your overwritten basketball article in the school paper. Remember the funerals and the band practices and the nights you spent with the EMTs at the Fire and Rescue squad. Everything is important.
Keep reading the dictionary for fun. When people make fun of you, just keep on doing what you’re doing. You’ve got the right idea. However, dropping $150 words in casual conversation is not always a great idea. It makes you look like a smart-ass know-it-all. You are a smart-ass know-it-all, but you don’t have to let everybody know it, just your family and closest friends. Remember they love you despite your faults. This fact will be important. Physics, science fiction, classical music — if you’re interested, keep on studying it. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s a waste of time or not something a black kid should be interested in. All your peers who think that basketball is the end-all-and-be-all of the Universe; all those folks who sneer at standard English and who think only “sissies” believe in subject and verb agreement — leave them to their own devices. Don’t ever worry about being “black enough” for anybody. You will learn, soon enough, that black folks have been at the foundations of all human experience: Nothing human is alien to you and your people, despite what the television and movies and magazines try to shove down your throat. You are not merely an “honorary Negro.” Your ancestors paid that bill for you a long time ago.
You grew up in the Church and right now the Church is strong with you. You worry about your so-called “unnatural affections” and the Scriptures and what Jesus thinks. Despite what people say, to quote one of your favorite songs in a few years, “The Lord don’t mind.” It’s foolish to think that any type of loving is wrong. That cat, Jesus, was all about love. So please don’t waste time focusing on the species of love but the quality of the love. Keep studying theology; it will come in handy later in a strange and wonderful way. (Please note: I said theology, not religion.)
You were born rich in identity — Black, Southern, Queer. Don’t ever let anybody tell you any bit of it is a burden. The sooner you start seeing your background, your reality, as a diamond mine, the sooner you will see yourself as a force to be reckoned with. In fact, though you don’t know it, you are a force already — just don’t mention it in casual conversation. That would be a little obnoxious. Just be a force. “O to be a dragon!” (The woman who wrote that, Miss Marianne Moore, will become one of your favorite poets. I envy the feeling you will get the first time you encounter her poems.)
The world is going to change in many ways for the better for black folk and for queer folk. However, ways of looking at black men, despite our achievements and accomplishments in the great world, will remain a vexed thing. So much of how the culture-at-large looks at black men, and their view of what a “man” should be is pure fantasy. A lot of this claptrap is designed to hurt you and to cut you down. To keep you in a box. To tell you what you should and should not do. Later for all that noise, brother.
And how this country looks at queer black men
, in particular — well, I hate to tell you but you’ll still be a strange and exotic creature in the eyes of a great many Americans. Big deal. Do not waste a minute fretting over how they look upon you. You have the power to define yourself — remember that power; take that control. It’s like a superpower, really, to be whom you want to be, to do what you want to do, to fly where you want to fly. Your life will get more complicated, but think of it as a great adventure, every damn day. You’re going to have fun.
Fun is waiting for you to have it.
Oh, and get this book and read it: The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián. I didn’t discover it until I was thirty-one, and I wish I’d read it when I was your age. It can help you through some dark moments.
Don’t smoke. Pay your taxes. Be wise in matters of sex and your body — a plague is coming: You can and will survive it, though the casualties will break your heart. Just keep creating.
And please buy lots of Apple stock. You’ll thank me. And I don’t mean the Beatle’s music company either. Leave that to Michael Jackson. Trust me.
For I remain,
Your loving self
Dear Janice,
I imagine this letter finds you on a gloomy day. So many of your days are overcast, clouded by your insecurities, fears, and doubts. Today I find you in one of your refuges. There you are, sitting on the beach at the edge of Sea Gate in Brooklyn — a private, gated community of which you are not part. You’ve snuck past a torn fence and found an odd boulder, the size of a Ford pickup truck, aggregated from concrete, sand, shells, and soda cans. You climb on top and wait patiently for the waves to lap around you, creating an island for you.